Virginia Woolf's Psychiatric History INTRODUCTION
Virginia Woolf holds a unique, if controversial, place in twentieth century literature. She won acclaim during her life as a novelist and essayist; posthumously she is perhaps more admired as a diarist and letter writer, and as a subject for biographies, reminiscences and doctoral theses - the so-called Bloomsbury industry. In the United States she figures prominently in courses of feminist studies.
She and her husband were central figures in the Bloomsbury Group, which included writers like Lytton Strachey, artists like her sister Vanessa and Duncan Grant, the art critic Clive Bell, and even an economist, Maynard Keynes, married to a ballet dancer. She came from a distinguished family on both sides. Her father's first wife was a daughter of Thackeray. Her father Sir Leslie Stephen was the founder and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, an important man of letters, and a well-known alpinist. Her sister was an artist, a cousin one of the first English psychoanalysts. Her husband Leonard, a respected left-wing political journalist and novelist, was not overshadowed by her success. Together they founded the Hogarth Press, whose publications included TS Eliot and the first complete English translation of Freud's works.
The Bloomsbury set was said, by Dorothy Parker, to comprise pairs who had affairs in squares. Their relationships were complicated, promiscuous, and frequently homosexual or bisexual. They wrote about themselves and their friends at inordinate length, first in their diaries and correspondence, and later in their memoirs. Virginia Woolf herself was a prolific correspondent and diarist for most of her life, and her husband published several volumes of memoirs.
As a result, her state of mind and her health over the 59 years of her life are remarkably well documented. Yet 'Was she mad?'is a question that preoccupies many of her present-day literary critics. She certainly thought so. In her letters and diary she often uses the word, writing matter-of-factly: 'When I was mad'. It was a view shared by her husband Leonard, her family, and her nephew and official biographer Quentin Bell. Contemporaries, friends and relatives, knew about, and recorded her instability, and her past illnesses and serious overdose were not closely guarded secrets in her lifetime, or immediately after her suicide. The most senior London specialists were consulted often, examined and treated her, and were in no doubt that she was mentally ill.
And yet today literary critics are divided into two vocal camps. There are those who accept the received view of her, her family, and her doctors, set out by Quentin Bell, her nephew, in the two volumes of his 'official' biography; and those who reject it. This other group comprises critics with various axes to grind, who believe that by a study of her life and work they can 'understand' her symptoms. Having done so to their satisfaction, they believe that they have explained away her madness. They believe that someone whose symptoms - or at least their content - can be 'understood' cannot be mad. In Karl Jasper's terms they confuse Verstehen and Erklarung; failing to realise that understanding the content of a psychiatric symptom or illness does not explain the form of the illness.
Much of this 'understanding' relates to her history of sexual abuse in childhood, and attempts to relate it to her adult illnesses. Others, with more knowledge of literature than life or psychiatry, assert that she was not 'really' ill at all.
Few qualified psychiatrists have commented on her psychiatric history, perhaps because they find little to disagree with in the orthodox view that she suffered from manic-depressive psychosis. And yet, although some of the events are now almost a century old, the unparallelled documentation available from the patient alone, combined with her intelligence, and her ability to convey subtleties of feeling, illuminate the relationship between mood and creativity.
Original sources will be quoted extensively. It seems sensible to trust records or comments made at the time. To take but one example - her husband Leonard Woolf, during her long and severe illness in 1915 made brief, cryptic, but daily entries about her symptoms and progress. In a court of law such a record, made at the time, would carry great weight. But not to some critics, who argue that her husband's comments must be treated with suspicion because of masculine bias, and his desire, conscious or otherwise, to dominate his wife. Her husband's and other contemporary records can be compared, and their consistency assessed.
There is no disputing her suicide. It will prove useful to begin at the end of her life, then move back in time to review the major illnesses of her life. Later, her childhood, personality, and family history will be examined, to explore their relevance to her record of illness.
PERSONALITY
There are many descriptions of her mature personality; indeed, the oral and written recollections of twenty-eight friends, relatives and servants have been published (Noble,72). They paint a consistent picture of an inconsistent individual. She was a mixture of shyness and liveliness. She 'was shy and awkward, often silent, or, if in the mood to talk, would leap into fantasy and folly and terrify the innocent and unprepared.'(Angelica Garnett). She was 'enormously generous.' 'Shop assistants made her feel shy and out of place'(ibid). Away from social life, she was a workaholic like her father. 'Leonard has said that of the sixteen hours of her waking life, Virginia was working fifteen hours in one way or another.'(John Lehmann).
Fellow writers elaborate on the extraverted side of her character. Elizabeth Bowen noted that 'her power in conveying enjoyment was extraordinary. And her laughter was entrancing. It was outrageous laughter, almost a child's laughter. Whoops of laughter, if anything amused her. ......She was awfully naughty. She was fiendish. She could say things about people, all in a flash, which remained with one. Fleetingly malicious, rather than outright cruel.'
Rosamond Lehmann confirms all this: 'Her conversation was a brilliant mixture of reminiscence, gossip, extravagantly fanciful speculation and serious critical discussion of books and pictures. She was malicious and she liked to tease.....she gave an impression of quivering nervous excitement, of a spirit balanced at a pitch of intensity impossible to sustain without collapse......She loved jokes, cracked them herself without decorum, and laughed at those of others.'
Her sense of fun showed in her dealings with children. She was fond of them and they enjoyed her company. Her future biographer, Quentin Bell, was one who, in childhood, looked forward to her visits 'more than anything.' 'Virginia's coming - what fun we shall have'.(Clive Bell)
Frances Marshall says 'Argument was not her forte, but wild generalisations based on the flimsiest premises and embroidered with elaborate fantasy...'
In a television interview in 1967 her husband said: '.....the way that her mind worked when she was perfectly sane. First of all, in her own conversation she would do what I called "leaving the ground". Suddenly she would begin telling one something quite ordinary, and incident she'd seen in the street or something like that; and when her mind seemed to get completely off the ground she would give the most fascinating and amusing description of something fantastic, quite unlike anything that anyone other than herself would have thought of, which would last for about five or ten minutes.'The young Stephen Spender often attended informal dinner parties given by the Woolfs. 'When entertaining she would, at the start of the evening, be nervous, preoccupied with serving the drinks. Her handshake and her smile of welcome would perhaps be a little distraught.' He was surprised, in the Thiries, that she often cooked and served the meal. She would often smoke a cheroot after dinner. The talk would be of literature, sometimes of politics, when she would fall silent and let the men talk. She loved to talk about social class divisions, and about the Royal Family, sometimes to the point of tedium, Spender thought. Despite her interest she did not approve of honours and refused the C.H. proffered in 1935.
Spender too saw her malicious side. She had one or two friends she cast in the role of jester and told anecdotes about - Ethel Smyth and Hugh Walpole were constant targets of gossip.
The picture that emerges from reminiscences is remarkably consistent. Socially she was a talkative, formidably intelligent, witty, and humorous woman. With friends she was talkative, given to flights of fancy, and fond of jokes and gossip. Even in private she talked. When her new housekeeper arrived in 1934, she was surprised: 'The floors in Monks House were very thin, the bathroom was directly above the kitchen and when Mrs Woolf was having her bath before breakfast I could hear her talking to herself. On and on she went, talk, talk, talk: asking questions and giving herself the answers. I thought there must be two or three people up there with her.....it startled me in the mornings for quite some time'.
She was often malicious. Shy at first in company, and ill at ease with strangers and those outwith her circle and social class, she was warm and affectionate with children and intimates. At times carried away by her fantastical imagination, she had difficulty in projecting herself into others work and lives and feelings. It was characteristic that she interrogated everyone she met about the details of their lives. She wanted to know all the details of peoples lives. "Now what did you do,exactly, what did you do?", Elizabeth Bowen remembers her asking, both of adults and children, making them scrutinise their lives, pinning them down, and of course provide her with copy.
Her love of fantasy led her to tease. If someone gave her a humdrum account of a holiday abroad, she would invent adventures they must have had, which became more and more extravagant and unlikely as they developed.
Her friends saw little of the depressive side of her nature, probably because Leonard was ever alert for warning signs, and insisted that she withdraw from social life immediately they appeared. And the history of her attacks suggests that even when very depressed she could dissemble socially.
There is nothing in her friends' descriptions to suggest the oddity, the barrier to communication, met with in the recovered schizophrenic. She could be rude at times, even snobbish, but she never experienced the slightest difficulty in communication - on the contrary. Friends delighted in her conversation, and many thought her the wittiest conversationalist of a highly articulate circle.
Mystical experience was not part of her public persona, but she had strange feelings of unreality when she was a child in 1894, looking at a puddle in Hyde Park Gardens. She recalled this in her 1940 reminiscences:'when for no reason I could discover, everything suddenly became unreal; I was suspended, I could not step across a puddle: I tried to touch something.....the whole world became unreal' She quotes the puddle in The Waves, and writes in her diary of the 'semi-mystic very profound life of a woman.' There are no other 'normal' abnormal experiences in her life; all other psychological symptoms are related in time and character to her affective illnesses.
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